


when i was... you were...

by halcydonia



Category: Super Junior, Super Junior-M
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Orchestra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 04:03:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3104903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcydonia/pseuds/halcydonia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kyuhyun sees life like he does music notes — black and white, dark and light. It takes a smiley violinist and a few private lessons for him to find his colors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when i was... you were...

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the qmidayeveryday 2014 exchange for cellophanecity.
> 
> Based on the prompt “AU where everything is black and white until you meet your soul mate; ADDITIONALLY: when your soul mate dies, the world goes back to black and white."

Kyuhyun's never met anybody with a soul mate before. It's not like anyone has the time or energy to put themselves out there, after all, and people get tired enough of waiting to find their "one true love" that they just stick with someone they can moderately tolerate for the rest of their lives and deal with it. 

But despite the fact that he hasn’t found his soul mate in his twenty odd years of life, Kyuhyun knows it would be pretty damn obvious if someone walked in front of you and you saw a burst of _color_. 

Kyuhyun's born to a family of teachers and raised as a musician. They don't really need the colors that they're born without; Kyuhyun's music notes are in black and white, and even the colorless diagrams in textbooks are easy to understand, after a while. It’s hard to miss what they’ve never had, so he's not so concerned about his soul mate just yet; he’ll find it when the time comes.

For now, Kyuhyun's got bigger plans in mind.

\--

There's one spot open in the Asia Philharmonic. One spot per instrument, every year, to replace those who are retiring or quitting. The lucky members are handpicked by their own orchestra's conductor to be considered by the Philharmonic admissions committee. Those who are ultimately selected are sent to an intense boot camp-like training in Tokyo, and then jetted off to all over the continent to perform in concert. The orchestra is famous; it's every musician's dream.

And this year it'll be Kyuhyun's reality, he's decided resolutely. Which is why, despite being up to his eyeballs in Mozart symphonies to practice and perfect, he agrees to waste his precious practice time on a stupid request from the young, annoying (and annoyingly talented) concertmaster.

"Please, please, hyung," Henry wheedles, doing that puffy thing with his cheeks that Kyuhyun swears doesn't work on him. "It's just one fifteen-minute audition. All you have to do is hear whether or not his playing is crap and report to me in the evening."

The rejection is just on the tip of Kyuhyun's tongue, but what Henry says next takes the cake: "I'll put in a good word for you when I meet with the conductor this weekend." And well damn, Kyuhyun can't say no to that.

So, Kyuhyun putters into one of the practice rooms at the conservatory the next afternoon, feeling naked without his cello hauled beside him. There are a couple chairs set up, a music stand with some sight-reading music. Violin, probably, Kyuhyun thinks, peering at the treble clef at the beginning of the staff. 

A quarter of an hour later, someone pushes the door open and shuffles inside — a man, young, smiley, and _bright_ , with a violin case strapped to his back. Kyuhyun tries to slouch in his chair more to look careless, authoritative, maybe to scare the man off. He sticks his hand out amicably anyway.

"Hello, my name is Zhou Mi. I'm auditioning for the open violinist spot in the orchestra." He's impossibly tall up close, with sort of disproportionate features; he could be a model, Kyuhyun thinks. 

"Kyuhyun," he says shortly instead, ignoring the hand. "What are you going to be playing today?"

The man, Zhou Mi, smiles a little wider and opens his case. He's prepared in a second, violin nestled on his shoulder and bow loose in his hand, like he’s been doing this since he was born.

There are two criteria that Henry told Kyuhyun to look for during the audition: technique and expression. Kyuhyun's met a lot of musicians with perfect technique, but they put an audience to sleep. The others sound either forced, or too loose. In his entire career, Kyuhyun’s only heard a handful of musicians who can successfully balance both, like Henry, and little Ryeowook the lead flautist, so he has pretty low expectations for this violinist with the enthusiasm of a newbie.

With Zhou Mi, however, the next three minutes blow Kyuhyun's mind away. 

Zhou Mi lowers his violin after the final note and eyes Kyuhyun with concern when he doesn't say anything. "Did I blow it?” he jokes feebly, rubbing at the back of his neck with his bowing hand. 

Kyuhyun swallows and tries to regain his voice that's been caught in his throat for the past minute and a half. "Who are you? Where do you come from?" he chokes out in disbelief, strained. 

"Beijing Orchestra. Concertmaster." Zhou Mi's lips begin to curl at the corners again.

"Then what the hell are you doing so far from China auditioning for a new position?"

"What's keeping you here in Seoul, Kyuhyun-ssi?" Cheeky, but observant; the high school t-shirt that Kyuhyun wears is telling, he supposes, and wonders why the space behind his eyes is stinging so much.

"I'll — No, Henry, our concertmaster — he'll keep in touch with you about… the position."

Zhou Mi stands before Kyuhyun does, like he’s the one with all the power, and it should be completely rude but Kyuhyun's pretty sure his verbal vomit seems much worse. 

"Thank you, Kyuhyun-ssi," Zhou Mi says, eyes smiling. "I look forward to working with you in the future."

\--

For the rest of the weekend, Kyuhyun allows himself to forget about Zhou Mi. About the way that he integrated his breaths into his performance, about his feather-soft bowing. Kyuhyun plays his Mozart symphonies into the wee hours of the morning, and shows up at practice on Monday exhausted. Henry grins at him from the violin section and gives him a thumbs up, so at least his conversation with Jungsu must’ve gone well.

After a few minutes Jungsu strides in perfectly on time like always, with someone tall in tow. Kyuhyun stiffens in his seat, completely awake. It’s Zhou Mi. 

“Welcome, welcome to another week of practice from hell!” Jungsu grins at all of them. “Our concert is coming up next week, so we need to be perfectly prepared. But first! Let me introduce you to this young gentleman over here. This is Zhou Mi, transferring from the Beijing Orchestra as our new concertmaster! I hope everyone will give him a warm welcome and make him feel at home here in Seoul.”

Kyuhyun politely claps along with the rest of the members, until something Jungsu said jars his brain. 

“ _Concertmaster?_ ” he hisses to his stand partner, bumping their instruments together, but the man only hisses viciously back about chipping the stain on his cello. By that time Jungsu raises his baton and orders them to take it from the top, before Kyuhyun can ask any more questions. 

\--

“What the hell, Jungsu?” Kyuhyun grinds through his teeth after practice when everyone’s gone. Jungsu looks up from his music and sighs like a martyr. 

“Were you planning this all along?” Kyuhyun continues, livid. “Did that audition mean nothing? A waste of his time and _mine_? What about the standard traditions of the orchestra? What about Henry?”

“ _Zhou Mi_ ,” Jungsu replies evenly, “is much more qualified than Henry is for the position. After hearing him play, Henry agreed.”

“But he’s new! He’s got to start his way at the bottom and work his way up just like the rest of us did — ”

“ _Kyuhyun_.” Jungsu sounds weary now and uncharacteristically stern. “I don’t want you to complain about how unfair this is. I’ve decided to make Zhou Mi concertmaster, and it’s going to stay that way. As conductor, I have that power.” His voice drops to a whisper and he glances over his shoulder to make sure no one is listening. “And as conductor, I also have the power to choose who the Committee considers for the Asia Philharmonic.” Kyuhyun gulps at once, biting his tongue.

“I’m seriously considering recommending you, Kyuhyun,” Jungsu says. “I heard there’s an open cello spot this year, and honestly I think you’re the best out of the lot that we have here in Seoul, especially after what Henry reported to me the other day. 

“ _But…_ ” Jungsu looks up expectantly, and Kyuhyun holds his breath, not even daring to believe.

“What you exceed in technique and dynamic, you lack in flexibility. In all the years I’ve known you, Kyuhyun, your solo work has been composed entirely of classical and baroque pieces. With the knowledge that this year the APhil’s set list is going to include mostly romantic and contemporary music, a portfolio of Bach and Mozart isn’t going to make the cut.

“Which I why… I enlisted a bit of help.” Jungsu raises his voice again, and stares at the doorway. “You may come in now.”

Zhou Mi shuffles in with his violin case strapped to his back, looking uncomfortable. Kyuhyun has no idea how much of their conversation he’s just heard. 

“As you could hear from the audition,” Jungsu says, “Zhou Mi is a master of romantic and contemporary music. He’s got the technique, he’s got the expression of a pro, but he adds something else… a _flavor_ to the music, if you will. I think you can learn a thing or two from Zhou Mi, Kyuhyun. Only then can I really begin to consider you for the Philharmonic.

“I’ve talked with Zhou Mi, and you two are going to meet here after rehearsal on Tuesdays and Fridays. The applications for the Philharmonic are due in two months; in that time, I hope you can make a lot of progress.”

The tone of finality suggests that the conversation is over, and Jungsu returns to his music scores. Kyuhyun glares at Zhou Mi, anger, disbelief, and resentment welling in the back of his throat, and Zhou Mi stares evenly back at him, no trace of the easy grin on his face, replaced instead with a hard resolve. From now on, it’s going to be a battle to prove himself compared to the skill of his new teacher. And in this fight, Kyuhyun knows that he has to come on top. 

\--

Kyuhyun lingers behind after practice the next day, and he notices Zhou Mi packing his sheet music extra slowly. Kyuhyun’s been watching him for the whole practice, and while Zhou Mi looks kind of like a goofball when introducing himself to the people around him, he transforms completely when he plays. Poised, professional, and focused is what Kyuhyun sees, and it’s hard not to be jealous of how Jungsu gives him an extra smile or Henry prods him with a thumbs up.

“Ready to get started?”

Zhou Mi’s unnervingly cheery after playing three full hours of Mozart. It’s amateur excitement, Kyuhyun tells himself. Soon, Zhou Mi won’t find Seoul any more different than Beijing. 

“Why don’t you play something for me first?” Zhou Mi suggests, like Kyuhyun’s a five-year-old. Kyuhyun bristles, but plays a vicious rendition of an excerpt of Bach’s cello suites. When he’s finished, Zhou Mi silently walks around behind him and presses all of his weight on Kyuhyun’s shoulders.

“What the hell — !”

“You’re stiff,” Zhou Mi explains. “Your shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ached every time you play. You have to pretend that you’re carrying sacks of rice. Once you relax your shoulders, your bowing won’t sound so strained.”

Kyuhyun tries to force Zhou Mi to get off, but Zhou Mi is much stronger than he looks. 

“Get off of me!” Kyuhyun growls, and when Zhou Mi complies he almost falls out of his chair. “I could sue you for assault!”

“All in all,” Zhou Mi says patiently, sitting down. “Your technique and intonation are perfect, and I’m impressed. It’s no wonder you’re first chair here.” Kyuhyun puffs up with pride.

“But what you need to do,” Zhou Mi continues, “is completely forget about all of that when you play.”

“Wh-what?” Kyuhyun stutters. Zhou Mi smiles.

“Your body knows how to do all of that — bowing, finger placement, et cetera. What you need to focus on instead is what the composer is trying to say. What’s the story? What emotions does the composer want to convey? Dig deeper. Playing music takes a brain, but performing takes heart.”

Zhou Mi walks over to the stereo in the corner of the room and pulls some CDs from the bin. “Here.” He hands them out to Kyuhyun. “These are recordings of professionals. Listen to how they play, and see if you can incorporate what you find into your own performance. And we’ll go from there on Friday.”

Zhou Mi’s been teaching him for all of ten minutes, and he wants to leave. Kyuhyun’s appalled.

“Yes, seonsaeng _nim_ ,” he spits out of spite, holding his chin up high. Zhou Mi seems confused by Kyuhyun’s response, and rather disappointed. Kyuhyun grits his teeth at Zhou Mi’s back as he watches him leave.

\--

Kyuhyun plays the CDs in his apartment that night. He has no idea what he’s looking for. But he does follow Zhou Mi’s suggestion, tying weights to his shoulders when he practices. He doesn’t want to admit how bitter he is when it turns out Zhou Mi’s right.

\--

On Friday Zhou Mi’s tone is gentle and sweet when they work on articulation, the difference between staccato and accents, and it grates on Kyuhyun’s nerves. 

“I learned this in grade school!” he argues. “Why are you teaching me this now?”

“We need to start with the basics, a foundation for the rest of what we’re going to go over.”

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“Kyuhyun-ssi,” Zhou Mi says sternly. “For the next two months Jungsu has asked me to help you prepare a comprehensive portfolio for the Philharmonic application. I’m here for _you_. Sit down.”

“Don’t waste your time! To hell with you.” And Kyuhyun walks out, seething at being treated like a child.

\--

The next few lessons don’t go any differently. Zhou Mi is infinitely patient, nudging and prodding at Kyuhyun to get him to behave, but Kyuhyun’s pride gets the best of him when he learns about slurs and non-legatos, piano and forte. Zhou Mi makes him listen to endless recordings and examples, even takes a hold of Kyuhyun’s cello himself to play something for him. Kyuhyun reacts the same way every time, walking out after less than half an hour while restraining his own rage, and it’s only Jungsu’s promise of a good recommendation that makes him stay even that long every time. 

He’s been playing in this orchestra for years. He’s not five years old anymore. 

“I’m tired of fighting you,” Kyuhyun says wearily three weeks after their first practice. “Why don’t we just stop.”

“Jungsu’s orders,” Zhou Mi replies patiently, like he’s repeated almost every lesson. “We have a little less than a month and a half left and we haven’t even chosen a repertoire yet.”

“ _Jungsu’s orders_ ,” Kyuhyun scoffs under his breath. “How much is he offering you for this, eh? To leave Beijing? Why are you helping me?”

Zhou Mi just shakes his head. “I came here of my own volition. Jungsu asked me to help you, so I am.”

“No bonuses? Free concert tickets? Hot girls?”

Zhou Mi chuckles, and it’s the most civilized conversation that they’ve had with each other since their first meeting. “No, none of that. I’m engaged.”

Kyuhyun looks up to see that Zhou Mi’s looking down. He glances at Zhou Mi’s hand. “You don’t wear a ring.”

“Was. Was engaged.” Zhou Mi looks away, and Kyuhyun can’t make out his expression.

Kyuhyun clucks his tongue in sympathy. “What happened?”

Zhou Mi shakes his head again, a little more urgently this time. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What happened?” Kyuhyun doesn’t know where the tenacity comes from. Maybe he wants to make Zhou Mi feel uncomfortable; maybe he wants to figure out why Zhou Mi looks so suddenly sad. Zhou Mi gives a long-suffering sigh.

“My fiancée was… my soul mate,” he says. “She died, a little over a year ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Kyuhyun says genuinely, and then with hesitation leans forward to pat Zhou Mi on the knee. He feels uncomfortable, suddenly reluctant and apprehensive to learn more. Over the past couple weeks he’s seen Zhou Mi cheerful, maybe a bit exasperated at times, but the sadness in his eyes doesn’t suit him at all.

“We came to Seoul because she was a trainee at a big entertainment agency. When she died, I tried to go back, to China. I found that couldn’t stay there, so I came here.” He looks up and gives Kyuhyun a big smile, one that stretches his cheeks but doesn’t reach his eyes. “So you’re not going to get rid of me, Cho Kyuhyun. You won’t make me leave.”

It’s like a punch in the gut, the guilt. Zhou Mi’s patience, his persistence. Zhou Mi’s voice is filled with a pride that Kyuhyun hasn’t heard before, and it makes Zhou Mi seem bigger, less pliable, like he’s coated in armor. It all makes sense now, and Kyuhyun’s been an ass to him this whole time. 

“Maybe…” Kyuhyun whispers almost to himself, but Zhou Mi’s drawn so close that Kyuhyun knows he can hear.

“Maybe what, Kyuhyun-ssi?” 

“Jungsu said… he said that you add flavor to your music.” Kyuhyun glances up to see Zhou Mi’s raised eyebrows and swallows thickly, hopeful. “Maybe what I need isn’t flavor… it’s _color_.” 

\--

Kyuhyun waits outside of the apartment complex, shuffling his feet in freshly cut grass that’s been piled up at the door. The building is across town from his own home, in one of those posh neighborhoods that make Kyuhyun self-conscious carrying around his huge cello case and wearing a hoodie.

_What the hell am I doing_ , he thinks, and bangs his head against the front door. 

“Kyuhyun-ssi?”

A window opens on the second floor, and Kyuhyun looks up to find Zhou Mi peering down at him, head quirked in question.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing!” Kyuhyun answers hastily, rubbing at his fringe. Great. Not only has he been a jerk to Zhou Mi, but now he also looks crazy. The door clicks open as Zhou Mi buzzes him up, and Kyuhyun makes his way up the stairs sulking. 

Zhou Mi’s apartment is just as Kyuhyun expected it to be in this neighborhood: light, spacious, with huge windows facing a view of the city. It’s tidy, if not a little bare, but the boxes packed in tape in the corners of the rooms suggest that Zhou Mi hasn’t been there for long, or maybe that he doesn’t plan to stay. 

Kyuhyun’s ushered into a separate practice room, devoid of windows, with a solid, padded door. There’s an upright piano in the corner, and lining the walls are dozens of cases of all different sizes. Kyuhyun itches to open them up; there’s no way Zhou Mi can play that many instruments, no way. 

Zhou Mi closes the door behind him, a plate of meticulously cut fruit in his hand. He holds it out to Kyuhyun like a peace offering. “Please, eat.”

Kyuhyun nibbles on the end of a pear as Zhou Mi sets up what he needs for the lesson: paints, it looks like, a palette, an easel, brushes. 

“Those aren’t the kinds of instruments I was expecting,” Kyuhyun jokes feebly. 

Zhou Mi shoots him a withering look. “You were the one who said you wanted to learn about color.

“It’s pretty straightforward,” Zhou Mi explains with a sigh as he squeezes the paints onto the palette. He labels the dots with a washable marker: blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple. “When we’re born, we see in black and white — ” he points to the two dots in the center of the palette that he’d labeled “ — but when we find our soul mates, we suddenly see in color.” He points to the dots labeled on the edges of the palette, the ones that still show in different shades of gray to Kyuhyun, but at one point Zhou Mi would have seen in vibrant color. 

“’The colors of the rainbow.’ I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, to put it simply. Red, yellow, and blue — ” he points out a triangle from three points of color “ — are the base, or primary colors. By mixing them you can make secondary and even tertiary colors: different mixtures of orange, green, and purple. But if you mix colors that are on opposite sides of the palette, you make brown.” He points to the dot he’d labeled by next to the black and white dots.

“Are you following me?” Zhou Mi prompts. His brow is furrowed in concern, and Kyuhyun realizes in embarrassment that his own face is screwed up in an ugly grimace. 

“Not really,” he admits. “It all looks like black and white to me.”

“Hmm…” Zhou Mi murmurs under his breath, and stands. “How can I explain this to you, when you can’t see?”

“You tell me,” Kyuhyun spits, mood rapidly turning hostile; he won’t be considered as lacking anything by anybody, especially just because he hasn’t found his soul mate. 

“Hmm…” Zhou Mi repeats, pacing along the edge of the room with the instrument cases. He stops in front of the piano. “Maybe I can do it this way.

“Colors,” he explains as he removes the covering of the piano, “can be associated with different emotions or motifs based on the feelings that they give us. Music is much the same. Somber music in a minor key reminds us of sadness or calm; muted, cool colors like blue and purple also give us such feelings. Therefore, we can associate somber music in a minor key to the colors blue and purple.” And he begins to play.

It’s the first movement of Beethoven’s _Moonlight Sonata_ , a piece that Kyuhyun’s heard dozens, if not hundreds of times in his lifetime. But Zhou Mi plays it in a way that Kyuhyun’s never heard before.

He feels the calm of an approaching night, deep and rich but also refreshing. It’s like when Kyuhyun first heard Zhou Mi play that piece during his audition; he feels like he’s floating, but he’s being pulled closer and closer, like he can’t stop listening. 

“Dynamic,” Zhou Mi speaks over his playing, tugging Kyuhyun out of his thoughts, “also plays a role. As the music grows louder — ” he follows a crescendo along the descending left hand into the lower range of the piano “ — the feeling is more intense if the key is lower. The color becomes darker, richer. If it grows louder in the higher range, the color becomes brighter. As the music becomes softer, the color becomes more muted, less vibrant.”

Zhou Mi modulates the piece and begins to play a jazz number, soulful and smooth. “This isn’t restricted to classical music, of course. Jazz, pop, traditional even. It’s all about feeling.”

And Kyuhyun feels it. The lines blur between his sight and his hearing, the melody becoming bright and tinny and the harmony a dark and complementary shade. For a moment, the colors seem tangible to Kyuhyun, but his imagination can’t make up what he hasn’t seen with his own eyes. He’s never before wanted a soul mate so very badly.

Zhou Mi finishes without bravado, not like he doesn’t know what he’s doing but rather because he seems self-conscious. 

“I guess that wasn’t too clear either,” he says sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. His eyes squeeze into tiny crescents as his grin becomes too wide. Kyuhyun swallows.

“No… it was good,” he says. “I’ve never had anyone teach like that before. We never learned about this kind of stuff in school.”

“Of course.” Zhou Mi’s smile becomes sad. “Not so many people need to know about it anymore.” 

The reality of it hits Kyuhyun hard, that he may never know who his soul mate is, may never see color like Zhou Mi had.

“What was it like, losing it?” he asks, and knows that Zhou Mi understands what he’s talking about.

“Just waking up one day without it?” Zhou Mi smiles ruefully. “Panic. Once we gain our colors, we only lose them once our soul mate dies, right? At that time, she was on a flight from Seoul to Tokyo, for a concert. I thought the plane had crashed, and I hadn’t been awake the exact moment she died.”

“What actually happened?”

“The entertainment companies don’t really tell you this, but you can see it quite clearly. They work their stars to death. There’s no mercy. She’d caught pneumonia from singing in the cold, and it developed into acute respiratory failure. Thirty thousand feet above ground and they didn’t pay attention. They couldn’t do anything about it.” _I didn’t_ , Kyuhyun hears. _I couldn’t_.

“Is that why you don’t have any pictures of her around your flat?” Kyuhyun asks gently. He has no right to pry, being a practical stranger and all, but after the progress of their lesson today he thinks he can push the boundary between them further. 

Zhou Mi sighs and pushes himself up from the piano bench with his hands, and the lukewarm atmosphere between them suddenly becomes frigid. “I think it’s time for you to go home, Kyuhyun-ssi. Now, if you’ll excuse me — ”

“Wait, Zhou Mi-ssi,” Kyuhyun says, holding a hand on Zhou Mi’s shoulder. Zhou Mi looks down at Kyuhyun’s tight fingers, conflicting emotions playing on his face.

“Every Friday, a few of us — Henry, Ryeowook from flutes, and I — get together for… whatever. Dinner, movies, games. Would you… like to join us tonight?”

Zhou Mi returns his gaze to Kyuhyun’s and presses his lips into a line. “I don’t need your pity, Kyuhyun-ssi.”

“It’s not pity,” Kyuhyun says earnestly. “I know you may not want to hang out with a bunch of kids like us, but — ”

“Are you calling me old?” There’s a hint of a smile in Zhou Mi’s voice now, strained but there, much to Kyuhyun’s relief. “Because I can assure you, my skin is a million times better than yours.”

Kyuhyun’s grinning widely back, and he lowers his hand. _Yes_ , he thinks. 

“Oh,” Kyuhyun says later when they’re outside waiting for the subway. Zhou Mi looks away from the line map. “I never apologized, for how I acted when we first met. Before today. So I’m sorry. I’m hoping now that maybe we could be friends? Colleagues, at least. And with colleagues, the formalities…” Kyuhyun’s voice trails off. 

Zhou Mi grins up at the ceiling and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I’ve never been totally comfortable with honorifics here. We don’t really have them in China. So you can call me Zhou Mi, Kyuhyun.”

“Zhou Mi,” Kyuhyun breathes back. And it sounds like a new beginning.

\--

Ryeowook and Henry are undoubtedly surprised when they find Zhou Mi trailing behind Kyuhyun into the noraebang room. They both stand and bow immediately.

“Good evening, sunbae!” Ryeowook says, still looking at the floor.

Zhou Mi does that thing where he rubs the back of his neck again and makes Ryeowook and Henry stand up. “We’re all around the same age,” he mutters, embarrassed. 

There’s a grocery bag on the table filled with snacks and drinks, and Ryeowook makes everyone help themselves (or rather, he shoves something into each of their hands). Henry animatedly pulls Zhou Mi to the side to flip through the song catalog, eager to practice his Chinese and talk about the latest gossip in first violins while Ryeowook sidles up next to Kyuhyun on the couch, eyeing Zhou Mi in interest. 

“I thought you didn’t like Zhou Mi-hyung. Said he was a crap teacher, and full of himself since he’s been made concertmaster.” Ryeowook raises his eyebrow at Kyuhyun playfully. 

Kyuhyun grimaces. “Don’t read into it. He seemed too pitiful with nothing to do on a Friday night.”

Ryeowook nods knowingly and sips at his canned margarita. “Zhou Mi’s a nice person,” he says casually, as if asking for Kyuhyun to refute him. Kyuhyun grunts.

“You’re too quick with your judgments.”

They’re good; they’re all pretty good at singing. Ryeowook’s voice cracks a bit from over-eagerness, Kyuhyun’s from embarrassment, and Henry’s from puberty, but there’s enough light liquor to slick their throats and keep their spirits high. Henry’s never been one to hold his alcohol well, though, and after a few beers and snacks that Ryeowook fed him he gets comfy on a corner of the couch before falling asleep.

Ryeowook gazes at him with an almost pained expression and carefully covers him using his own jacket. He knows that Kyuhyun is watching, but doesn’t know that Zhou Mi is too, so he curls up next to Henry as close as he can without jostling him, and dozes off.

Kyuhyun looks at him with something akin to pity in his eyes, and Zhou Mi finishes up his song without the cheers from the others like he’s gotten all evening. Over the past few hours, Kyuhyun’s learned that Zhou Mi is an ace singer, and that his laugh rings out higher than the rest of theirs, bright and sharp. Zhou Mi settles himself next to Kyuhyun, and it’s comfortable now, to just sit here and relax like this, no practice, or applications, or lessons.

“So, Henry and Ryeowook, eh?” Zhou Mi asks after a while, gesturing with his bottle when Kyuhyun’s leisurely sipping his beer over the softness of the music. Kyuhyun gives a fond smile.

“Yes, and no,” he says. “It seems obvious that they like each other, right? But… They both have these ideas, about love, you know. Ryeowook more than Henry. He thinks that he should wait for his soul mate before he makes a commitment to somebody, because he may end up making a grave mistake if he makes that kind of decision by himself.”

“Ah,” Zhou Mi murmurs. “I see now.”

“Nowadays, the statistic is that only five percent of the population will ever encounter soul mates. I suppose you’re lucky that the decision was made for you, eh Zhou Mi? That you found yours?” 

“What is your opinion about soul mates, Kyuhyun?” Zhou Mi asks. His voice is casual, but his posture is tense waiting for Kyuhyun’s answer.

“I think,” he says slowly, “that regardless of whether or not you find your soul mate, the decision of who you love shouldn’t be forced.”

Zhou Mi smiles and raises his beer, as though that was the answer he was look for. “Then we are of the same opinion. Cheers.”

“I’m not looking for a soul mate, not now,” Kyuhyun continues, clinking their bottles together. “I don’t quite like people telling me what to do.” He smiles ruefully at Zhou Mi, who gives a little grin back in understanding.

“Tell me more about your soul mate,” Kyuhyun decides to say then, and the smile disappears from Zhou Mi’s face.

“I think I’m going to need another drink for this,” Zhou Mi mutters and reaches over to grab another beer. Ryeowook murmurs softly against Henry’s shoulder in his sleep.

“My soul mate,” Zhou Mi says when he rests back on the couch. “Her name was Song Qian. Victoria was her debut name. We met at a recording studio in Beijing. I was recording some background music for a friend’s radiobroadcast, and she had come with a group of trainees.

“You already know this, but the connection was instantaneous. We knew immediately that we were each other’s soul mates. Her friends went crazy, and none of us quite knew what to do.

“Qian had been a trainee for SM Entertainment at that time. She danced, she was amazing at dancing, but she couldn’t sing or rap very well when she first started out, and was older than the rest of the lot that was there. She had very little chance to debut, to be honest. But then, she met me.

“She ended up debuting under a group whose concept was to display the purity and love of girls who had found their soul mates. Kind of silly in my opinion. But…” Zhou Mi sighs. “She loved what she was doing, and I loved her. I was the concertmaster of the Beijing Orchestra, but I dropped that, I dropped my whole life to come to Seoul with her.”

“Do you regret it?”

Zhou Mi shakes his head emphatically. “Not at all. Seoul has become more of a home for me than Beijing ever was. And… I would have followed Qian all the way across the world if I had to. She made me happy effortlessly. She was sweet, caring, and she just got it, you know? What it was like being an artist in these times. She was my best friend and lover all at once.

“Unfortunately…” Zhou Mi purses his lips. “I guess I was so blinded by ‘love at first sight’ that I didn’t see that she was getting sicker and sicker… and I didn’t do anything about it. We were happy together. I cared about that happiness more than her health. And well… look how that turned out.” His grip on his bottle tightens, almost infinitesimally. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Kyuhyun whispers. “It’s not your fault.”

Zhou Mi laughs hollowly. “Then why do I feel so guilty?” When Kyuhyun says nothing, he sighs. “I think we’re both to blame. We thought we were invincible, just because we were a little different. We could see in _color_.” His voice turns bitter at the last word, and his mouth quirks in mirth. 

“I have a strict policy about not being sad, though,” he says, voice humming in tune to the music playing from the karaoke machine. “I’m pretty content with my life. Now it’s just time to go forward.”

Kyuhyun nods slowly, drains the last of his drink, and reaches for another one. “Do you have a picture of her?” he asks. Zhou Mi bites his lip and pulls out his phone, fiddles with it a bit, and shows Kyuhyun a picture from a search engine. 

She’s pretty, this Victoria, beautiful even, tall, slender, and cheerful looking next to her members. Zhou Mi’s standing beside her, their arms linked, and he looks absolutely radiant amidst the flashing lights, like he can’t be any more proud of his fiancée.

Kyuhyun clicks on another picture of just Victoria by herself. Makeup paints her eyes huge and the lipstick accentuates her bright smile, all to detract from the dark shadows of tiredness under her eyelids. It’s believable that she’s happy, just _exhausted_.

Zhou Mi’s unusually merry, even for him, as they drag Ryeowook and Henry home on the subway. Kyuhyun attributes it to the fact that he’d given Zhou Mi the last sweet in the grocery bag, but he can’t help but think as he walks into his empty apartment that he’d seen a reflection of Victoria in Zhou Mi’s sad eyes.

\--

Kyuhyun learns a lot of things about Zhou Mi over the following weeks. Like how Zhou Mi is fiercely proud of his playing, but becomes unsure of himself when he teaches Kyuhyun. Like how his smiles are as abundant as water and take up his whole face, curving his eyes into little thin crescents of genuine happiness, and how he laughs with his whole body.

Over the next few weeks, Kyuhyun learns about the colors of the rainbow with Zhou Mi, orange for Bartok’s _Romanian Folk Dances_ , yellow for Chopin’s _Butterfly Etude_ , and even pink, because Zhou Mi’s in a kind of funny mood that day. Sometimes Zhou Mi plays recordings for Kyuhyun to hear, for an orchestral piece or a quartet, but mostly Zhou Mi chooses from the instruments in his own practice room or the conservatory and plays for Kyuhyun live, pieces all memorized and perfect and _emotional_ like Kyuhyun’s never heard from anyone else before. Zhou Mi has a certain fondness for his violin, though, and chooses it most out of all of his instruments, caressing the strings with care and meticulously putting rosin on his bow. 

Kyuhyun rarely plays himself during the lessons, nibbling on fruit that Zhou Mi gives him when they decide to venture to his apartment rather than stay at the conservatory and becoming completely and utterly entranced with how Zhou Mi plays. 

Zhou Mi’s apartment remains the same as time passes, boxes still in the corners of the rooms, and no pictures on the walls. Kyuhyun also learns that Zhou Mi has no desire to speak any of this, about himself or his past, so it’s Kyuhyun who needs to do all the talking. 

“Why did you become a musician, Zhou Mi?” he attempts to ask one day, but Zhou Mi doesn’t look up from the flute he’s polishing.

“Why did _you_ become a musician, Kyuhyun?” he counters, and Kyuhyun’s resigned enough that he doesn’t bother arguing.

“My older sister, Ahra, plays the violin. She studied in Austria, and when she came back she was accepted to the Asia Philharmonic right away. She was always better than me at playing. I guess I just want to show her up, just once.”

It’s awkward like this, after Kyuhyun tries to push Zhou Mi further because Kyuhyun’s laid out his whole life and all his desires to Zhou Mi when all he knows about Zhou Mi’s past is about his soul mate instead, and a friendship really shouldn’t be so one-sided. Zhou Mi is forward with his feelings, but not his words, Kyuhyun learns. Being with Henry and Ryeowook is easier because Zhou Mi is more relaxed, less severely protective of himself, so Kyuhyun calls them together more and more often, until they’re all meeting almost every day, and Zhou Mi slides so easily into their routine as if he were always there. They all like to make Kyuhyun meals, Zhou Mi, Ryeowook, and Henry, and Kyuhyun’s designated “you go set up the dishes like a good little boy” because he lives on ramen and takeout and might burn down the kitchen if he’s asked to help.

“Are you lonely, Kyuhyun?” Ryeowook asks one night over the sound of sizzling meat. Kyuhyun winces, and looks to where Henry and Zhou Mi are fighting over a movie, Zhou Mi happily protesting when Henry tickles under his arms. Things are better, with Zhou Mi around; Kyuhyun’s less of the third wheel to Henry and Ryeowook’s dance, and there’s more laughter now, fewer tight eyes and clenched fists. It’s not like it was that bad before, but Kyuhyun can’t imagine going back, not now. He shakes his head.

“How could I be, with you guys babying me all the time,” he retorts, with more emotion in his voice than he’d expected, and Ryeowook turns back to his cooking, brow creased with worry.

\--

“Why do white peaches tend to be sweeter than yellow peaches?”

“Hm?”

“White peaches… is there any reason why they’re sweeter than yellow peaches? Does the color matter?”

They’re sitting in Zhou Mi’s kitchen, feasting on the ripe white peaches that Zhou Mi picked up from the market after orchestra practice, licking the sticky juice that runs down their chins and coats their fingers. The question seems to baffle Zhou Mi at first but he recovers, swallowing around a bite of fruit. 

“Well…” he says carefully, taking another peach from the bowl on the counter. “There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to colors in nature, except that water is blue and leaves are green and you should generally stay away from anything really really bright; white by no means indicates sweetness any more than yellow does.”

“But sugar is white,” Kyuhyun counters archly.

“Salt is white too, and I don’t think you’d use that to sweeten your coffee any time soon.” Zhou Mi laughs at Kyuhyun’s cheesy sheepish grin. He cleans his hands fastidiously, and beckons for Kyuhyun to finish. “C’mon,” he says. “I’m going to test you on something.”

“T-test me?” Kyuhyun stammers back and lets himself be pulled along by the wrist into Zhou Mi’s practice room. Kyuhyun’s become used to touches like this, on the arm, on the shoulder, on the thigh from Zhou Mi, after all of these lessons and outings. Zhou Mi’s just a natural skinship fiend when he’s in the mood, and Kyuhyun’s too shy to protest.

“We’ve done quite a few colors so far.” Zhou Mi sits Kyuhyun down and begins to set up his violin, easing on the shoulder rest and tightening his bow. “How about I test you in a different way today? I’ll play a piece, and from the colors you’ve learned, determine what best suits what I play. Got it?”

“Ah… I think so.”

Zhou Mi gives Kyuhyun an encouraging smile, and, like always, brings his violin to his shoulder, rounds his wrist, and plays, and Kyuhyun, like always, is enthralled.

“ _Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini_ , variation 18,” he breathes, and closes his eyes.

It’s the piece that Zhou Mi first played for Kyuhyun during his pseudo audition, the piece that threw Kyuhyun into a trance, pulled this way and that by the notes Zhou Mi played, by his bow and his hand. 

Kyuhyun can never get used to Zhou Mi’s performances, the emotions he puts into them, but this piece is different for Zhou Mi, Kyuhyun knows. Knows it from the way Zhou Mi’s eyes close, eyelashes fluttering over his skin, from the way he sways into the crescendo and holds his posture open and proud for the final notes.

“…well?” Zhou Mi asks when he’s finished, and Kyuhyun can’t help but think that his voice sounds choked up.

“Um. Um?”

“The color, Kyuhyun,” Zhou Mi reminds softly.

“Ah…” Kyuhyun murmurs, and can’t look anywhere near Zhou Mi’s eyes. “Ah. It can’t be blue, it’s too passionate, not calm enough. It’s not soft, like brown is. It’s bright like yellow, but the tempo isn’t quite right.”

“Pink,” Kyuhyun concludes finally, staring into Zhou Mi’s eyes hard. “The piece is pink.”

Zhou Mi lets out a long breath and smiles, relaxes, after a while. “Yes,” he says, “yes.”

“It’s the theme of a film, _Somewhere in Time_ ,” he continues after a long pause of staring and caught breaths. “Love is timeless. That’s what the film’s about. But this man had to travel all the way into the past to realize that. You have to work for love, I suppose; it doesn’t come so easily.

“The piece sounds rosy to me. It’s like… the feelings of love, all of them in a couple pages of music.” Zhou Mi gives a laugh that cracks at the end. “Absolutely beautiful.”

Kyuhyun eyes Zhou Mi carefully, wondering at Zhou Mi’s sudden change in mood. “It’s something about Victoria, isn’t it, that makes you talk like that,” he says, accusing. Zhou Mi looks abashed.

“It was her favorite piece that I’ve played.” Kyuhyun narrows his eyes and opens his mouth.

“Help me play it,” he decides, right then and there. “For the Philharmonic application. Help me, Zhou Mi.”

Zhou Mi looks appalled, and slightly panicked. “But. I…”

“Zhou Mi, _please_.”

“O-okay,” Zhou Mi concedes finally, some strange emotion sparkling in his eyes. “What — whatever you wish, Kyuhyun.” And it feels so, so satisfying.

\--

Zhou Mi sort of hedges around the idea for a while. There are times when it’s on the very tip of his lips and he’s about to blurt it out but then something that Kyuhyun says or Henry does makes him laugh, and he decides to forget about it, for now. So, obviously, Ryeowook takes it upon himself to be the messenger.

“Kyuhyun, why doesn’t Zhou Mi set you up on a date?” he drawls during dessert one evening. Zhou Mi splutters into his coffee.

Kyuhyun’s no better, letting his spoon of ice cream slide into his lap. As he vigorously rubs at his pants with a napkin, he hisses in Zhou Mi’s direction. “You want to _what_?”

“Set you up on a date!” Zhou Mi chirps an octave higher than normal, eyes boring very intently into his mug. “I know a lot of nice girls who were trainees with Song Qian, and I think one of them would suit you well!”

Kyuhyun pinches the bridge of the nose and sighs. “And why on _earth_ do you think I want to go out on a _date_?”

“Hyung, you’re getting kind of scary. Like all the time,” Henry chatters nervously while Ryeowook pets his back. “I need to visit my parents sometime before summer’s over.”

“Then go see your parents! I’m not tying you down here. I’m so stressed out with the orchestra and the applications, I don’t have time for — ”

“And that’s exactly why you need to go out,” Zhou Mi cuts in, seemingly having found his normal voice again. “You’re too tense, Kyuhyun, I tell you this all the time. And I know you’ve said you don’t want to put yourself out there just yet, but really, Kyuhyun, why not give it a chance?”

“Yes, and you guys are the ones talking,” Kyuhyun mutters darkly under his breath, sending Ryeowook and Henry a nasty glare where they’re nearly cuddled up around each other on the counter. 

“Just try it Kyuhyun, please — ” And Kyuhyun’s very nearly convinced by Zhou Mi’s kicked puppy dog eyes when his phone rings in his pocket.

“Telephone ~ ” he sings out obnoxiously loud and hops hastily out of his seat to excuse himself.

“Hello?” he answers in the living room, closing the door to the kitchen.

“Kyuhyun!”

“Noona,” Kyuhyun sighs in recognition. “How are you doing?”

A laugh. “You sound relieved, dongsaeng.” 

Kyuhyun laughs back, easy. “My friends were being annoyingly persistent. Setting me up on dates.”

“Ooooh,” Ahra croons knowingly, and Kyuhyun groans.

“What is it you want, noona.”

“Ouch. Just wanted to say hi to my favorite little brother. Is there anything you want from Macau, while I’m here?”

“What would I want from Macau?” Kyuhyun scoffs without heat. “How’s the orchestra doing?”

“If you’re applying this year, you’re up for a lot of competition, Kyuhyun-ah. There’s one cello spot that I’m aware of, and a lot of hype about some crazy good applicants from Japan. You should be careful, Kyuhyun-ah.”

“I’m not worried about that. I’m asking about _you_ , noona.”

“Ahh, being your usual defensively aloof self,” Ahra says sagely. “I see right through you, Kyuhyun-ah. But I know you’ll do well if you take after me at all.” She pauses to yawn, and Kyuhyun waits almost a full minute before she speaks again. 

“It’s tiring to travel so often, Kyuhyun-ah,” she says. “I must be getting old.”

“Just think of all of the doors being in the APhil opens for you, and how hard you worked to get there. Imagine how many people want to be in the position you’re in right now,” Kyuhyun scolds lightly. _Like me._

“Yes, mother, I’m thankful.” And the extravagant sarcasm in Ahra’s voice makes Kyuhyun laugh again.

“Don’t work yourself too hard, Kyuhyun-ah. Even if it’s for the APhil, your health is more important. Maybe you should go on one of those dates after all.”

Kyuhyun sighs, feeling a pulsing at his temple. “All right, all right, I should get back then. Don’t work too hard, noona, the stress will be too much on your old heart.”

There’s a strange, distant tone in Ahra’s voice when she responds. “Mm. I’ll say the same to you, Kyuhyun-ah. Take care of yourself.”

“Call again soon.”

Kyuhyun walks back to the kitchen feeling sort of puzzled, and isn’t helped when he finds that Ryeowook’s looking highly self-satisfied and Zhou Mi looks uncomfortable, almost wary.

“So, Kyuhyun, how about one of those dates.” Kyuhyun’s thrown off by Zhou Mi’s tone, drawn out and empty. 

“I told you, I — ”

“Just once. If it doesn’t work out I won’t try again, I promise.” Kyuhyun wants to protest, until he catches sight of Zhou Mi’s face, alive and vibrant only a minute ago and now completely blank, as though smeared with a careful veneer.

“A-all right,” he finds himself saying without thinking, if only to get some reaction out of Zhou Mi. And he does get that, a sigh through the teeth. Zhou Mi blinks and steels his expression, and he almost looks normal again. From the corner of his vision Kyuhyun can see Ryeowook narrow his eyes. Zhou Mi ignores him.

“So,” he begins with a huge grin, “her name is…”

\--

Zhou Mi starts to look at Kyuhyun a little differently now, with a question in his eyes. Maybe it’s because they’re almost done with all of Kyuhyun’s lessons, but Zhou Mi isn’t trying to disengage himself from Kyuhyun, or Ryeowook, or Henry, as if he was going to leave them, and he’s not clinging either. 

No, rather it’s that Zhou Mi hesitates before he takes the cello out of Kyuhyun’s hands or puts more food on Kyuhyun’s plate. Or he’s too cheerful, grabbing at Kyuhyun’s shoulder too hard or knocking Ryeowook over in his haste to get more ice cream.

Kyuhyun’s not really sure where this extra defensiveness in Zhou Mi has come from, this thin layer of a façade, but he sees other changes in Zhou Mi, too.

Slowly, the unopened boxes disappear from the corners of Zhou Mi’s apartment. There are little trinkets on the side tables now, souvenirs and books and CDs. What moves Kyuhyun more are the picture frames that end up hung on the walls in the living room next to the television, or in the breakfast nook above the window. They’re of Zhou Mi’s past, which he still refuses to tell Kyuhyun about, but it shows itself in Zhou Mi’s smiles when he’s posing with an old professor or laughing with a friend. 

There’s one photo of Victoria in Zhou Mi’s bedroom. It’s not edited, grand, or posed, just the two of them smiling, smiling brighter than sunshine, right at each other in the middle of a recording studio. It’s the kind of photo that could show up in a wedding album if only they had a little makeup on their faces.

The photo in Zhou Mi’s practice room is huge, larger than Kyuhyun would expect because it’s a really crappy picture and the pixels are blown too wide. It’s just them, Zhou Mi, Kyuhyun, Henry, and Ryeowook, eyes fever bright after coming out of a concert. What sentimental value it has for Zhou Mi, Kyuhyun doesn’t know, but at the very least they all look very, very happy.

Zhou Mi gets a little thinner, maybe sleeps a little less with the upcoming applications for the Philharmonic due. But sometimes Zhou Mi’s gaze lingers too long, and that disconcerts Kyuhyun more than anything.

In the end, Kyuhyun really can’t blame Zhou Mi, because he finds himself looking extra, too.

\--

“Blue, green, brown, purple, orange, pink, yellow… we’ve done all of those, if I’m not mistaken?” Zhou Mi asks on a Friday afternoon. They’re sitting in the orchestra room, damp with sweat. Jungsu had been angry with the percussionists for stressing the up beat instead of the down beat, so he’d been particularly vicious in making them play from the top over, and over, and over again. The pads of Kyuhyun’s fingers still feel numb and callused. 

“Can’t we just go,” Kyuhyun wheezes. “I’m exhausted.”

“Jungsu’s orders,” Zhou Mi sighs back. “I’ll try to make this as interesting as possible so you don’t fall asleep.” Zhou Mi brings his hand to cup Kyuhyun’s face, and wow this is the first time Zhou Mi’s ever done this for a lesson. “See?” he says. “Warmth. It’s associated with the color red.”

“So does that mean that our skin is… red?” Kyuhyun breathes out. Zhou Mi’s thumb is very, very close to the corner of his mouth, and he can feel the other side of his face, not just the skin that Zhou Mi’s touching, heat up.

Zhou Mi chuckles. “No. Skin comes in all different shades of brown, tan, cream. It does get red though in the face.” He brushes his fingers along Kyuhyun’s cheekbones, his ears. “There are a lot of blood vessels there, and blood is red; it can rush to your face when you exercise, or when you’re nervous or embarrassed. It’s called ‘blushing.’”

Kyuhyun gulps, feeling the lingering warmth of Zhou Mi’s hand on his cheek. “I think I’m blushing now.”

“Is that so?” Zhou Mi sounds endlessly amused, and turns to his violin with his mouth quirked strangely. “Now, for the music.”

Zhou Mi lifts his violin to rest under his chin. “One of the most famous violin concertos in existence, Tchaikovsky’s _Concerto in D major_. I’ll play the second movement, _Canzonetta_.”

It’s somber, the piece. It sounds like real human tears. Kyuhyun’s reminded of the blue piece Zhou Mi played for him, Beethoven’s _Moonlight Sonata_. They’re similar in tone, but Kyuhyun doesn’t feel the same endless calm that the Beethoven brings. Instead, there’s a push and pull, the melody pulling Kyuhyun up and up and up until the final crescendo, when the piece comes crashing down to a few almost breathless notes. It’s a piece of passion, loss, and pain that leaves Kyuhyun’s heart bleeding red. 

“Tchaikovsky wrote this when he was suffering from depression after his marriage failed,” Zhou Mi explains when he rests his violin on his knee; his eyes look sunken in, and he wrings his hands together. Kyuhyun doesn’t miss the way his touch lingers in the ring finger of his left hand. “The piece is a fight with himself. His mind. War, passion, lust, blood: they’re all things we associate with the color red. Any questions?”

There are a billion on Kyuhyun’s tongue, but the words stop when they reach the top of his throat. When Kyuhyun jerks his head, Zhou Mi excuses himself to go home, leaving Kyuhyun wondering why his heart is beating so hard he can feel it all the way in his ears. 

\--

Amidst all of the late-night practices and concerts, Kyuhyun has almost forgotten that his lessons with Zhou Mi actually had some sort of purpose in the first place. In the last few weeks before the applications for the APhil are due, they each scramble to search for last-minute pieces to squeeze into their portfolios, and make their recordings. 

Zhou Mi spends all of his free time coaching Kyuhyun on his playing — _a pause here, Kyuhyun_ or _here you have to play like you want to break the hair on your bow_. Kyuhyun feels bad, because Zhou Mi has a life outside of the orchestra too, but soon the satisfaction on Zhou Mi’s face as Kyuhyun gets closer and closer to the perfect recording, the light in his eyes and his shining smile, make Kyuhyun stay quiet. 

Zhou Mi trains himself on his own. Sometimes, when Kyuhyun knows he’s going to be practicing late enough to anger his neighbors, he sneaks into some of the practice rooms at the conservatory to play, only to pause by one of the other rooms. He sees Zhou Mi through the slots of window on the door, immersed completely in his own playing, and it’s no wonder why Zhou Mi’s looking more and more exhausted every day. It makes Kyuhyun practice harder when he’s with him, to make Zhou Mi’s time worth it.

Kyuhyun makes his final recording for the application with Zhou Mi on the other side of the glass window, giving him smiles of encouragement. He plays the version of _Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini_ that he and Zhou Mi had transcribed with his whole heart and soul, throwing himself into the music and playing like the bow is an extension of his own hand, holding it as though it were a delicate rose instead of wood, and is left sweating afterward. And the pride that he feels when Zhou Mi gives him a thumbs up and a tiny smile, it’s unlike any other that he’s felt before. He plays a few other contemporary pieces afterward, and sneaks in a Bach just to appease his own nerves.

Zhou Mi decides to play _Rhapsody_ as well, and for the rest of the recording session Kyuhyun can’t think about anything but Zhou Mi’s final notes, ringing through his mind and his body and shaking his core.

Jungsu submits their applications all together, all twenty that he’d deemed acceptable. Zhou Mi whoops and hugs Kyuhyun when Jungsu presses _send_ , and Kyuhyun’s mouth opens before he can even control it.

“Zhou Mi,” he says fervently, holding him by the shoulders so he doesn’t bounce up and down anymore. “Your recordings. Did you make an extra copy of the CD? Can I have it?”

Zhou Mi looks shell-shocked for a moment, like he’d never ever expected anyone to make such a request, much less Kyuhyun who listens to his playing every day.

“Y-yeah,” he stammers, and takes the disc from his pocket. Kyuhyun clutches it in his hands for a moment before safely tucking it into the padding of his jacket. 

“We’ll make it,” Zhou Mi says then, with so much conviction that Kyuhyun almost believes it himself. “We’ll make it.”

“Thank you, Zhou Mi. Thank you,” Kyuhyun says back, and has no idea why all he wants to do is cry.

\--

Kyuhyun prepares for his date in a very Kyuhyun way. He makes a reservation for the fancy fusion restaurant downtown, buys a bouquet of flowers, and irons all of the clothes in his closet. And, after listening to some Mozart to calm his nerves, he, of course, calls the others over to help.

“What do I even wear,” he fusses, and runs his hands up and down the top of his hair in grief. Zhou Mi, Henry, and Ryeowook are sitting on the floor of Kyuhyun’s bedroom giving him the stink eye, because the bed is covered in clothes. 

Zhou Mi had told him that the date would be “business casual,” so he chooses a blue button-up with dark grey pants and a patterned tie. He doesn’t expect to be as nervous as he is, so he can’t understand why it’s so hard to get the knot right when he’s tied so many ties for concerts in the past. 

“Aish,” Zhou Mi groans after Kyuhyun’s third attempt, pushing himself from the floor. He walks up to Kyuhyun and, like the first lesson they had, presses his entire weight on Kyuhyun’s shoulders.

“What do I always tell you,” he chides gently as he straightens Kyuhyun’s tie. “You’re too _tense_.”

Zhou Mi’s alarmingly close, so close that Kyuhyun can feel the warmth of his breath on his face. He closes his eyes. 

“There,” Zhou Mi says finally, holding Kyuhyun by the shoulders. “You look perfect.”

“Yeah, hyung. She’s going to love you.” Henry slings an arm over Kyuhyun’s neck in a loose headlock and laughs while Kyuhyun flails vigorously to shake him off. 

“Yah, if you do that again I’ll break your violin to pieces,” he grumbles, but it’s half-hearted; it’s so nice to have friends.

Kyuhyun arrives at the restaurant half an hour early and spends the time fiddling with his empty wineglass and ripping petals from a daisy, only roused when he hears a quiet _annyeonghaseyo_ behind him.

She has kind eyes, and a pretty forehead. She’s beautiful in an understated way, not in willow-thin legs or full lips, but in a way that makes Kyuhyun like her immediately. She’s the kind of girl who Kyuhyun would have loved to woo if only he desired to. Because still, she doesn’t bring that spark of color that he had so hoped for.

She does, however, look pleasantly surprised by the bouquet of flowers that Kyuhyun holds out for her, and by how he takes her coat and helps her sit down.

“So, does Zhou Mi set you up on blind dates often?” Kyuhyun jokes as an icebreaker over their menus, and is successful in coaxing out a light laugh.

“Actually yes,” she admits rather sadly. “He thinks I’m lonely because I’ve been single since we met. I just need to find someone who’s ‘my type.’”

“He thinks I’m too tense, and that I need to go out more with people who aren’t just my best friends,” Kyuhyun pouts in reply.

His date finds it fascinating that he’s a cellist and asks him to record some background music for her next track, to which Kyuhyun readily agrees. She is a small time solo artist for SM, a close friend of Victoria’s when she was alive and that was, consequently, how she got to know Zhou Mi. 

“Even if you didn’t have a soul mate yourself, they made you feel like you were loved too. It’s like they had so much love to spare that they would give it to you instead of keep it all to themselves,” she says fondly, swirling her wine. “The short time that Zhou Mi spent away from Victoria when she was a trainee was harsh on both of them; I guess that’s why he stays in Seoul now.”

“He doesn’t really like to talk about her,” Kyuhyun says, taking a bite of his steak. The food’s good, well seasoned and prepared, and it’s the perfect setting for a date.

She nods. “He’s still hurting. Don’t pin it against him. He changed a lot, after Victoria died. He used to smile, genuinely, and laugh at really stupid things. Now he’s more serious, and focuses on music.”

Kyuhyun wants to contradict her on that; he’s seen first handedly how Zhou Mi can laugh until he cries, and how his smile lights up his face. But he didn’t know Zhou Mi a few months ago, so he isn’t someone who can tell the difference between then and now.

In the end they share a dessert and Kyuhyun’s date fights rather feistily to pay for half the bill; another point in her favor, Kyuhyun thinks. He sees it coming though, long before she looks into the dregs of her glass and denies his pouring more wine for her. 

“I’ve had a lot of fun tonight, and I’m glad we got together, but…”

“You’re not looking for anything serious at the moment.” Kyuhyun gives a rueful smile. “I kinda got that from the get-go. I’m glad you still went along with it, because it was a pain in the butt to get this reservation.”

She smiles back, apologetic. “Zhou Mi was right though,” she laughs. “You’re totally my type. You’re kind, and musical, and charming. But… I know this sounds silly of me, but I still believe that soul mates like Victoria and Zhou Mi exist, you know? And I want to find mine. I’m sorry that that’s all in my head right now.”

Kyuhyun just shakes his head and waves a dismissing hand. “You know,” he says, “I used to think that soul mates were imaginary. But I met ah… someone… not too long ago who’s starting to change my mind about that. Maybe in a different way, but… yeah,” he finishes lamely and rubs at the back of his neck.

She gives him a big hug like a mother would give to a son. “Well, whoever she is, I wish you good luck. She’d be lucky to have you,” she murmurs into his shoulder and pulls away.

Kyuhyun thinks about correcting her for a moment; after all, he’s not exactly pursuing _Zhou Mi_ , and Zhou Mi is most certainly not a girl. But then again, maybe she doesn’t have to know that much. 

They part with warm goodbyes and well wishes. The girl gives Kyuhyun a cheerful “Cho Kyuhyun, fighting!” and a wave before she boards her taxi. Kyuhyun chases the car with his stare and a tiny smile and walks off with a new spring in his step.

\--

The next morning when Kyuhyun’s preparing to go to orchestra practice, his phone rings brightly in his pocket.

“Noona,” Kyuhyun answers as he boils milk for coffee. “How are you doing?”

“Kyuhyun-ah,” Ahra replies, and Kyuhyun can hear the smile in her voice. 

“How’s Hokkaido?”

“Fantastic! You’d love the food here, Kyuhyun-ah. And I think I can cook some now! I’ll make you something when I come back home.”

Kyuhyun settles on his kitchen counter, ruefully eyeing the ramen packages and takeout boxes in the trash. “That sounds great, noona.” There’s a pause, warm and comfortable. 

“Kyuhyun-ah…”

“Hmm?” Ahra sounds uncharacteristically solemn, and Kyuhyun stops his rifling through his cabinets to find something to appease his growling stomach.

“Kyuhyun-ah,” Ahra says, “I think this time I’m going to come home… for good.”

Kyuhyun drops the instant coffee he’s holding. “You’re _leaving_? The orchestra? For good?” he splutters. 

“Kyuhyun-ah,” Ahra says, as though she’s pleading Kyuhyun to understand her. 

“But you’re… you’ve worked so hard for this! The APhil was your dream since you were a little girl! What would make you leave?”

“It’s been too long, Kyuhyun-ah… There’s no upward growth here. Whatever position you get, you’re stuck with for the rest of your career. It’s fun to travel around and all, but I miss home.” Kyuhyun can hear the weariness in her voice, the longing.

“Ahra…” 

“Kyuhyun-ah… I’m getting married.”

“Married?”

Of all things, Kyuhyun hadn’t expected that from his sister. A decision to get married, away from him, away from his parents, without their knowing? It was so unlike his sister, who had chased her dreams all the way to a music conservatory in Austria, and found herself a star in the Asia Philharmonic.

“Is he… your soul mate?” Kyuhyun asks, strained. 

“No,” Ahra says. “He’s a percussionist in the orchestra, from Daegu. He’s lovely. You and mom and dad would approve of him.”

“Do you love him?” Kyuhyun ignores the last statement, pressing the phone closer to his ear. His heart beats loudly in his chest, and his eyes sting with tears he has no idea why he would shed.

At this Ahra laughs. “We’ve been told that love only comes with true soul mates, so… I really don’t know. But I care about him. And he cares about me. I can picture starting a family with him. I can’t be apart from him, not now I think.”

Kyuhyun lets out a low breath between his teeth. Ahra’s voice is soft and sweet and affectionate. It seems, now, that none of her past boyfriends can compare to this nameless, faceless man from Daegu. 

“But your career, Ahra,” Kyuhyun says, pained. “How can you leave it behind?” 

“I’ve thought about that too, silly.” The smile is back in Ahra’s voice. “I’ve been doing some teaching to little kids overseas in between concerts. I think I can be a music teacher when I come back home. I’d like that.

“You’re not angry with me, are you?” she continues softly, making Kyuhyun’s breath catch. It’s a question that makes Kyuhyun stop and think. There are always stories of people dropping everything, their jobs, their families, their lives, just to chase their soul mates across the world, and to most people they’re the rebels, senseless and insane. But to hear the conviction in Ahra’s voice, the quiet happiness, Kyuhyun maybe understands why they do it, just a little.

“No, noona,” he says finally, and he’s surprised at how firm his voice is. “But I’m going to be your best man, you hear? And you have to have your wedding in Korea, mom and dad would want to see you in your dress, too.”

Ahra laughs, and it sounds like she’s crying. “Thank you, Kyuhyun-ah,” she says emphatically. “I love you.”

“I love you too, noona,” Kyuhyun says, smiling. “Tell me when you’re coming back, okay? I’ll pick you up from the airport and then you can cook a huge meal for me and your fiancé.”

“You’ve got it. Aish, but it’s a shame that you’ll be leaving for the APhil soon after I come home, eh?”

“Nothing’s been decided yet, noona. It’s a few more weeks before the decision comes out.”

“I hope you sent in a good recording. I heard that the Committee’s been looking at applications for Yunho-ssi from Gwangju and Minho-ssi from Incheon too!”

“Don’t worry, noona. I’m definitely better than both of them.”

Ahra laughs again lightly. “All right, I’ll let you go so you can practice more. Oh wait! Before I forget. How’d your date go?”

“Ah…” Kyuhyun trails off awkwardly. “I guess she just wasn’t ‘the one.’”

“Don’t worry too much, Kyuhyun-ah. You’ll have plenty of time to meet people in the future when you’re part of the Philharmonic. I’ll see you soon, my cute dongsaeng.”

“Bye, noona.”

Kyuhyun hangs up and clutches his phone to his chest. _I’m getting old_ , he thinks, wiping at the damp corners of his eyes in embarrassment. 

_Ahra’s happy_ , is his next thought. He fingers the postcards that she sent to him during her journeys throughout the continent that are stuck on the fridge, the pictures that she’d taken on the Great Wall of China and Macau Tower. He leaves the kitchen to run his hands along the strings of his cello in the living room, and plucks a few notes with his fingertips. Like always, he settles on his chair and rests the instrument between his legs, picks up his bow. The music comes easier now than it ever had before, and Kyuhyun thinks that this is happiness, too.

\--

The weekend before the admissions results for the APhil come out, Kyuhyun decides to gather the gang once more, because after they know the new members, he doesn’t know when they’ll be able to do something like this again.

“An amusement park, Kyu? Really?” Henry rolls his eyes as they get their tickets. 

“Yah, maknae,” Ryeowook chides, hitting Henry over the head. “Be grateful that your hyungs are agreeing to take care of you today.”

But Kyuhyun does feel bad when it turns out that Henry has a previously undiscovered fear of heights and almost passes out when they approach the biggest roller coaster in the park.

“I d-don’t think that’s s-s-safe, hyung,” he chatters as he looks up at the towering steel. Zhou Mi, on the other hand, is chattering with a different sort of excitement.

“Oh, Kyuhyun look! It looks scary. But we should try it since we’re here, shouldn’t we, shouldn’t we?” He grasps Kyuhyun’s shoulder so tight that it hurts, and with Henry holding onto his wrist Kyuhyun’s in more than enough pain without the roller coaster.

“Kyu,” Ryeowook interrupts, easing away Henry’s hand much to Kyuhyun’s relief, “why don’t I take Henry to the arcade? You and Zhou Mi can go on a few rides, and we can meet up at the cafeteria at noon for lunch. We can figure out something else to do afterward” The words are like sanctuary to Henry, and finally it seems like he’s relaxing. 

They walk off together, their arms brushing as Ryeowook tries to comfort Henry from the imagined horrors he conjured up of going on the roller coaster. Soon enough they’re both nearly doubled over in laughter, and Ryeowook shoves Henry off playfully when their youngest drapes himself dramatically over Ryeowook’s shoulders.

“Oh, Kyuhyun, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were actually together? They look so happy with each other,” Zhou Mi whispers with a far-off look in his eyes.

“Not if one of them finds out that they made it to the Asia Philharmonic and is forced to leave the country for a year to train.” Kyuhyun’s voice is bleak as he steers Zhou Mi toward the line, but has trouble when Zhou Mi’s rooted to the spot, following their two friends’ bodies in the crowd. 

“They’ll make it,” Zhou Mi says, with the same conviction in his voice that he had when they submitted their applications. “They’ll make it.”

Zhou Mi screams like a girl, Kyuhyun notes a few hours later after Ryeowook had texted them, _where the hell are you guys there’s only so many times you can play skeeball without having your arm fall off_. Kyuhyun has no pity for them; Henry had probably massaged Ryeowook’s arm all better, and vice versa. 

“Ah, right!” Zhou Mi exclaims after he finally catches his breath from all of his shouting on the last ride. “I never asked you about your date! We hadn’t really gotten a chance to talk afterward.”

“Ah…” Kyuhyun awkwardly digs his hands in his pockets. “You know, you probably should stop setting up that poor girl on dates. She’s a big girl, can figure out her own love life by herself.”

Zhou Mi’s face falls, and Kyuhyun is reminded briefly of puppies. “So it didn’t go well?”

Kyuhyun shrugs. “She’s nice. We liked each other. We exchanged numbers. I think I’m going to be recording some music for her sometime in the future. But she’s looking for her ‘soul mate.’ She’s one of those people.”

“Like Henry and Ryeowook?” Zhou Mi nods in understanding. “I get it, I guess. Imagine, being in a relationship and then finding out someone else is your soul mate? Talk about awkward.”

“But what if you find someone after your soul mate? Someone you like just as much?” Kyuhyun says almost to himself, but he knows that Zhou Mi’s listening intently. “With a soul mate you’re not given a choice. What if you want to say no?”

Zhou Mi’s tone startles Kyuhyun enough to look up, bleak and serious. “You always have the choice, whether or not you want to love your soul mate,” he says. “But if you make that decision, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. You can’t love anyone more than you love your soul mate.”

The way Zhou Mi’s talking, it’s like he wants to convince himself of that. That in the end, you can’t help what happens when it comes to soul mates. Kyuhyun narrows his eyes. 

Ryeowook and Henry greet them cheerfully when they make it to the cafeteria, pressed together at a table and complaining about grumbling stomachs. Zhou Mi puts on a façade like he usually does when he’s being pensive, and Kyuhyun smiles along, trying to push away the resentment he feels curl in his stomach. 

\--

There’s a hush in rehearsal the next morning. Everyone’s gathered in their little cliques: the first violins with the first violins, the flautists with the flautists. Kyuhyun’s huddled at the front of the room with Zhou Mi, Henry, and Ryeowook by his side, and he doesn’t realize he’s shaking until he picks up sheet music and it all jitters to the floor. 

Practice is nonexistent for the day, so after an hour an exhausted Jungsu resigns himself and lets everyone leave. Kyuhyun bids his friends goodbye, and tries to make it to his apartment without spontaneously combusting.

Kyuhyun’s about to stick his hand into his mailbox when he feels his phone vibrate in his pocket.

“I know this is lame,” Zhou Mi laughs nervously when Kyuhyun picks up. But Kyuhyun laughs back because he understands, and he steels himself because he can feel it, the suspense, the relief, right at his fingertips.

His pulse rises to his throat when he sees the Philharmonic’s logo printed on an envelope at the top of the stack of mail. Zhou Mi takes a deep breath on the other side of the line, and Kyuhyun can hear the rip of paper. He swallows, and peels back the fold of his own envelope.

_Dear Cho Kyuhyun-ssi,_

_The Admissions Committee has carefully reviewed your application to the Asia Philharmonic Orchestra. After much consideration, I regret to inform you that —_

Kyuhyun stares at the words in disbelief for a long, long time before he crumples the page in his hands, feeling nothing but… emptiness. All that he’s done this year, all of the extra hours of practice and his bleeding fingers and callouses —

“I… I made it. Kyuhyun, I made it.” 

Zhou Mi’s voice startles Kyuhyun so much that he drops the mail in his hands, and he scrambles to pick the envelopes up. His hands shake so much that the papers crinkle in his fingertips. 

“Kyuhyun, Kyuhyun we’re going to Tokyo together! Can you believe it? Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. But — but I could have sworn — _everyone_ was sure that the violinist spot would go to Changmin-ssi from Osaka — Kyuhyun?”

_Kyuhyun-ah, I think this time I’m going to come home… for good._

_Ahra_ , Kyuhyun realizes, heart sinking to his stomach. _Zhou Mi’s replacing Ahra._

“Zhou Mi,” Kyuhyun wheezes back. There’s pain building behind his eyelids, and the sting of tears. Horrified, he stumbles up the stairs to his apartment and locks the door behind him, sliding down the wall to put his head on his knees. Everything’s suddenly become too bright, too loud, too sharp. “I didn’t make it.”

“You… what?”

“I didn’t make it, Zhou Mi,” Kyuhyun gets through his teeth. He’s breathing so harshly that his chest feels like it’s being ripped in two, and the anger flares out of nowhere. 

_I didn’t make it._

_No._

“ _I didn’t make it!_ ” he shouts into the phone. “Cho Kyuhyun, the shoe-in, the star cellist from the Seoul Orchestra. Isn’t that what everyone said? Isn’t that what _you_ said? But still. I didn’t make it. After all those lessons, after _all those hours_ of practice, I’m still not good enough for the Asia Philharmonic.”

The grief and disappointment are fueled by the pain in his head that makes his vision pulse in and out of focus. Zhou Mi made it. Zhou Mi made it and he’s going to go to Tokyo, he’s going to go all over Asia with the title that Kyuhyun wants _so much_ , and it’s not fair, it’s not _fair_ that Kyuhyun will be tied down to his dingy apartment in Seoul to practice, _alone_ , for another year. 

“Kyuhyun, I — ”

“No, I — I _can’t_ , Zhou Mi, not after all of this. I — I — ” And Kyuhyun doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore, his head is swirling and his heart is pounding in his chest like it’s about to burst, and the emotion seems to come out of every pore of his body and suddenly he’s so _exhausted_. 

Kyuhyun throws the phone across the floor and bolts to his room, awash in the brightest sunlight he’s ever seen. With a strangled cry, Kyuhyun yanks the curtains closed and throws himself on the bed, just wishing, wishing that the pain in his head would stop, would _stop_ , and like that, he succumbs gratefully to darkness. 

\--

Kyuhyun wakes to birds singing a tune that sounds strangely like Fauré. Judging by the way his migraine’s been reduced to a faint pulsing behind his eyes, he’s been out for a few days at most. He tries to sit up in bed, but the room is dark, curtains closed, so he flips on the light switch above his head.

And then his head starts hurting again.

It’s… _different_. Kyuhyun can’t tell how, can’t put a name to it. His room seems alien to him now. He runs a finger along the wood of his headboard, expecting it to be soft and pliable, and then the cover of a book of sheet music on his bedside table, as though it would be hot to the touch. But the feel hasn’t changed; something else has.

Kyuhyun gasps and bolts out of the room.

There are plates stacked on the countertop, waiting to be washed. Kyuhyun had bought them when he’d moved in with the belief that they were a matching set, when in fact they’re completely different from each other, in different shades and colors, so vivid that his eyes burn.

_Colors._

Kyuhyun tries to put names to them. His headboard was brown, earthy and soft-looking, the sheet music cover red. The mug on the coffee table (a darker stain than his headboard) is a light, cool shade of blue. Nothing in his apartment matches, it seems, because he hadn’t really been thinking about the colors of his furniture when he couldn’t see them. It’s disordered, chaotic. It’s _beautiful_.

Kyuhyun backtracks to when he passed out, in front of his apartment, on the subway home, at orchestra practice, and he’s suddenly vibrating with excitement. Who could it be, his soul mate? The one who finally let him see color?

He winces when he remembers his last conversation with Zhou Mi, before he’d fallen unconscious. The anger had been uncalled for, and completely took him by surprise. It was like he couldn’t stop it, like the emotion was a riptide pulling him in without any mercy. It was unfair to Zhou Mi, for Kyuhyun to act like that. 

Zhou Mi.

Zhou Mi.

_Zhou Mi._

Zhou Mi, who gave him lessons every week. Zhou Mi, who laughed with him when they’d gone out together. Zhou Mi, who’d been the last person he’d talked to before he passed out and awoke to see color. Zhou Mi, who’d become an integral part of Kyuhyun’s life, a friend, someone Kyuhyun couldn’t imagine being without, not now.

_I can’t be apart from him, not now I think_ , Ahra had said about her man from Daegu.

Zhou Mi, his soul mate? _Impossible._

Kyuhyun can hear his phone ringing distantly in the other room. He pays it no mind, his senses feeling numbed in disbelief. Sometime later in the day there’s banging on the door, too, and a voice that sounds like Henry’s.

For hours, Kyuhyun wanders through his apartment, touching earthy greens, vibrant oranges, soothing blues. He tries to convince himself that his soul mate isn’t Zhou Mi. It could be his blind date, or his pretty neighbor, hell, even Henry or Ryeowook. But even at the first glance of his soul mate, Kyuhyun should’ve been able to see the colors that he can now, the reds and purples and yellows. He’d met no strangers on his way home from practice. It goes against everything he’s ever been told about love. 

In the end, Kyuhyun can’t seem to muster the same fondness when he thinks of anyone but Zhou Mi, or the same ripping agony when he thinks, _Zhou Mi’s leaving_.

Kyuhyun lies in bed that night and tries to relax his whole body, except his eyelids. He squeezes those together, tighttighttight, because he’s afraid of what he can now see. 

\--

There are things now that shock Kyuhyun, chill him to the bones. Like the red and blue on his faucet, marking the hot and cold taps. Or the pink that floods to his cheeks when he looks at himself in the mirror. What scares him the most is that he doesn’t know what it _means_ and why it has to be _him_. He wonders when he’ll be able to look at something without a question in his eyes.

\--

Kyuhyun reads four missed texts, from when he was confined to his bed:

_Kyuhyun, we’re worried about you. Have you been eating all right?_

_Jungsu’s about to have a fit, and Ryeowook looks like he’s going to cry._

_Henry’s calling security at your flat. They might break down your door to get you if you don’t answer soon._

_My flight’s booked for next Wednesday, 6 pm. Will you come see me off?_

_I’m sorry Kyuhyun, I’m so, so sorry._

\--

Three o’clock Wednesday afternoon finds Kyuhyun flipping through old photo albums on his bed in his apartment. He traces lines of colors in the photographs, the candy apple blush of his sister’s cheek, the deep, dark stain of his cello. It’s strange, the vibrancy, the life that’s given to the pictures, like they’re actually his own memories instead of still frames in shades of gray. 

The colors send all of his nerve ends on edge: his thoughts are too loud, the blankets pooled at his waist too hot. Kyuhyun stands when a date, time, and in a happy scrawl, _APhil!_ , circled in red on his calendar catches his eye and closes his throat. He walks over to his stereo and throws a CD in at random, anything to get him out of his head.

But it jolts him into a harsh reality instead, because it’s Zhou Mi’s CD, and the first track is _Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini_ , variation 18. 

_It’s the theme of a film_ , Somewhere in Time, Zhou Mi had said. _Love is timeless. That’s what the film’s about. But this man had to travel all the way into the past to realize that. You have to work for love, I suppose; it doesn’t come so easily._

_The piece sounds rosy to me_ , Zhou Mi had continued with a laugh. _Absolutely beautiful._

Kyuhyun remembers the other colors that Zhou Mi taught him, too. Blue, for the first movement of Beethoven’s _Moonlight Sonata_ , red for Tchaikovsky’s _Canzonetta_. Orange for Bartok’s _Romanian Folk Dances_ and Lalo’s _Symphonie Espagnole_. Kyuhyun glances around his flat, at the mismatched picture frames and tables, couch cushions and pans. 

_Absolutely beautiful._

The piece comes to an end, and Kyuhyun starts at Zhou Mi’s idea of a joke, Sarasate’s _Carmen Fantasy_ blaring from the speakers. He curses and turns in a fluid movement, grabbing his keys and his coat at the entrance to his apartment, and lets the front door swing shut with a _click_ , trapping the beginning notes of the melody inside.

\--

Kyuhyun reaches the gate just as they’re boarding first class. He wastes a precious moment trying to catch his breath, but his eyes are scanning the crowd for someone tall, gangly, and Chinese. 

Zhou Mi’s not hard to pick out with his sunglasses perched on the hat on his head (seriously, who does that?) about a foot above a gaggle of short old Korean women. He seems out of place, a little bit lost, and his face is muted. He looks like he’s looking for something.

“Zhou Mi,” Kyuhyun cries out. “Zhou Mi!”

Zhou Mi jerks around and stares at Kyuhyun in disbelief, and Kyuhyun swears he sees Zhou Mi mouth his name. He gets out of line, shoving the old ladies to the side, and is in front of Kyuhyun in a second.

“You’re here,” he murmurs, and reaches out like he wants to grab Kyuhyun’s hand but pulls away like he shouldn’t, just like he’s been doing for the past few weeks. Kyuhyun swallows.

“You stopped texting,” he says in a small voice, and Zhou Mi’s face hardens. 

“You didn’t reply.” 

Kyuhyun attempts to look at his toes in embarrassment, but startles when he sees the bouquet of flowers in his hands, like he forgot it was there. 

“Oh, I. I got this for you, I wanted to give it to you before your flight. They’re… sunflowers.” Kyuhyun vaguely remembers bumbling into the florist’s and asking for the brightest flowers that they had; the girl manning the cashier looked at him like he was crazy. Then Kyuhyun remembered: she can’t see like he can, now. 

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” he babbles on when Zhou Mi steers him into a corner behind a duty free store. “I’m pretty sure security’s looking for me.”

“Why did you come all the way here just to give me _flowers_ after we haven’t spoken for _two weeks_ , Kyuhyun.” There’s frustration in Zhou Mi’s tone, but something else in his eyes, unreadable and frightening. Frightened.

Kyuhyun hasn’t really thought this out properly, so he stalls to trace the planes of Zhou Mi’s face with his eyes, so full of color. His hair’s still black, teeth perfect white, skin maybe a shade of darker ivory. But there’s the color of Zhou Mi’s lips that he’d told Kyuhyun were pink, and the flush on his cheek’s fiery red and probably hot to the touch. Kyuhyun braves the strange look Zhou Mi’s probably giving him to glance from under his lashes up to Zhou Mi’s eyes, and oh. _Oh._

“The sunflowers,” he says, and now he can’t stop the words coming out like water. “The petals are yellow, like the sun. No, brighter than the sun. They remind me of your smiles. And the seeds in the middle,” Kyuhyun pauses to gulp for air, because he’s drowning, he _can’t breathe_ , “they’re the same color as your eyes, Zhou Mi.”

At first, Zhou Mi looks confused, and a bit second handedly embarrassed. His brow furrows, but then he _gets it_ , and gasps.

“Kyuhyun…”

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Kyuhyun says derisively, quiet to himself. “I kept trying to think, _Who is it? Who could it be?_ The colors, they were so bright. We’ve always been told that it’s an instantaneous thing, the colors. You’d know right away who you’re soul mate is. When you met Victoria, you described it as love at first sight. But I guess that’s not really the case for everybody, is it? 

“And for you,” he continues, “you can’t… see them, can you?” There’s a pained silence and Zhou Mi shakes his head. Kyuhyun’s heart drops to his stomach. 

“How can I fall in love with a person like you,” Kyuhyun laughs, voice deadened with heartache, “when you can’t even love me back. Not in the way I want.”

“Kyuhyun, I — ”

But Kyuhyun interrupts him, doesn’t let him finish. “If it had been me, before Victoria. Before you met her. Could it have been me?” There’s desperation now, an aching desire for validation that he’s good enough, could be good enough, would be good enough —

Zhou Mi’s hand raises to cup Kyuhyun’s face, fingers swiping the wing of the cheekbone there. Kyuhyun wonders how that action can hurt more than the infinitesimal shaking of Zhou Mi’s head, the mouthing of a _no_ on his lips. 

“So I’m just supposed to let you leave, isn’t that it? Because it’s either the Asia Philharmonic, every musician’s dream, or staying with me, Cho Kyuhyun, lead cellist tied down to Seoul, South Korea. Because if I truly love you, I have to learn to let you go.”

Zhou Mi keeps stroking the skin of Kyuhyun’s cheek, eyes shining with emotions Kyuhyun can now recognize; grief, pain, and pure, unrestrained love. The color’s all left from his face except for his rosy lips. He lowers his hand.

“I know that pain,” Zhou Mi murmurs, glancing out the window where planes are taking off into the blue, blue sky. “The loss of a soul mate. Being apart. It’s… agonizing. The most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my entire life.”

_So you’ll stay?_ Kyuhyun wants to scream, but he bites his tongue. It’s unfair to Zhou Mi, Kyuhyun’s wanting to chain him here, to Seoul, where they still have their lessons and their laughs, their private conversations. Dinners with Henry and Ryeowook, songs that make their throats ache when they sing. It’s unfair to Kyuhyun, to find out that his soul mate has been right in front of his eyes all along, just to let him go. So Kyuhyun breathes, and he knows that he can scream, he can shout, but that won’t change anything, the unfairness of it all. Won’t change the final boarding call, for a _Zhou Mi-xiansheng_ for the flight from Seoul to Tokyo that’s preparing to take off as they speak. And, after all, actions speak louder than words. 

So Kyuhyun knocks off the bright green hat perched atop Zhou Mi’s head, fists his hands in the back of Zhou Mi’s dark blue sweater. The bouquet of flowers drops to Zhou Mi’s gold-tipped shoes, and Kyuhyun can see spots of sunshine through the prickles of tears in his eyes that begin to run down his face. Kyuhyun grabs hold of Zhou Mi, _tighttighttight_ , and never wants to let go.


End file.
